The cake is a lie

Baking update this month! I've been working on a bunch of crafty things, but none of them are really worth showing off in-progress shots, so I'm going to wait til they're finished to post them here. But this is a thing that happened yesterday!




BeardBoy's housemate is a great guy, who's gracefully put up with me moving in with them in all but name-on-the-lease. I still have stuff at my apartment, but I haven't spent a night there since before Christmas. ANYway, it's his birthday, and he likes my baking, so of COURSE I was going to bake him something!

Thing is, though, I wanted to make it kind of special, and dude's hobbies happened to make it perfect. He's a gamer. So, of course, there's the cake that's a lie. And I decided I was going to make a lie cake.

My original plan was to frost a box that fit over the real cake, but I couldn't find any hat boxes at the stores that were easily accessible, and making one out of posterboard seemed like a) too much trouble for a gag and b) possibly lacking in structural integrity. So when I saw this easter basket for less than $2 at the grocery store, I knew what I had to do.

It looks like it has a wide, collar-like rim, but actually it was pretty much perfectly cylindrical aside from that tiny lip at the very edge.

Upside down on a cake stand, natch

Like hell was I going to shave a crapton of chocolate for a fake cake, so I roughly chopped a bunch of the cheapest cheapy store-brand chocolate chips

Cover it with cheapy-cheap frosting ...

It, uh. Took a lot more chocolate than I thought. Not all of a 24oz. bag, but well over half of it.

But in the end I thought it made a pretty convincing lie!

Housemate was highly entertained. Especially because there was a real cake to be eaten after he'd tried to slice into the fake one!

It was a simple thing -- I was pretty much out of spoons for baking, so I grabbed the best box mix I could find, spruced it up with olive oil and long time in the mixer, brushed it with Kahlua when it came out of the oven, and frosted it with the easiest and most delicious frosting I know of.  That was the design I intended to do for BeardBoy's birthday in September, but I couldn't find the gold frosting. I ended up doing a Hitchhiker's Guide design instead:

(It's my blog; I can post old photos if I feel like it!)

Oddly enough, both of those cakes are made with the same frosting -- I think I didn't blend the Marvin cake's frosting long enough? It was much glossier and smoother this time around.

And today, there's banana bread in the oven and I'll be making broccoli cheese soup a little later in the day -- and meanwhile, I'm watching classic Doctor Who (last episode of 4!) and grading a set of quizzes for the class I'm teaching. Pretty much a perfect Sunday!